Put on the spot like that, David hesitated.
But Olivia simply waited, and when he still didn’t answer, she understood, and said, in a gentler tone, “Why?”
“I believe in it because I have to,” he finally replied. As he told her about his sister, and his voice grew hoarse with emotion, Olivia got up from her chair, came around the table, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She smelled of bath soap and hot croissants.
“Do you remember what I told you in the back of the cab in Florence?” she asked.
David did not immediately know what she was getting at.
“I told you that we were alike. We do not do things for money. We do things for love. And now,” she said, “at last I know the real reason for your search.”
David felt a huge sense of relief, but at the same time he was still concerned for her safety. “If you want to return to Florence and go back to your normal—”
But she stopped him by putting a finger on his lips.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Everything that has happened—including those men on the train last night—all of that has made me feel … restored.”
“Restored?” David said. It was about the last thing he might have expected her to say. “How?”
“All my life,” she said, slipping around from the back of his chair and insinuating herself into his lap, “I have spent holed up with my books and my papers and my theories. Sometimes, I would think to myself, what do they all matter? Who cares but me? But now I know that the truth does matter. Now I know—now I remember—that there are people who will do anything to suppress it.”
“But they’ll try again.”
Olivia shrugged, and with one hand cradled his chin. “Let them,” she said. “The truth always comes out in the end.”
But when David started to protest one more time, she said, “If you are trying to get rid of me, it won’t work.” She shook his chin. “So will you stop?”
“I’ll stop,” he conceded.
“Good,” she said, grazing his lips with her own before going back to her side of the table. “Now eat something. We need to go to the Louvre. The crown jewels are waiting.”
Chapter 22
“How hard was it?” Escher said, as they approached the main courtyard of the Louvre. “You call yourself a doctor, you had one simple thing to do, and you couldn’t get even that much right.”
Julius’s face scrunched up like he’d just had to eat something sour. “But I did do it right,” he replied in a last-ditch attempt to defend himself. “If the dosage had been any higher, they’d have keeled over in the dining car.”
Escher was sick of discussing it. He wasn’t used to working with amateurs.
“Maybe it would help,” Julius ventured, “if I knew what this was all about. First you run me out of Florence—if I go back to my place, some Turk is going to try to kill me—and now I’m in Paris, chasing after God knows what. Is there a point to all this?”
“The less you know, the better off you’ll be.” Escher knew, from experience, just how annoying it was to be told that.
“Well, then I should be in very good shape, because I haven’t got a clue.”
“Keep it that way,” Escher said, “and wait here, out of sight, until I call you.” He straightened his alpine, badger-bristle hat, and took the glasses and guidebook from his pocket. Now he looked pretty much like the other provincial German tourists who had just arrived, in a busload, at the museum. He left Jantzen standing by the glass pyramid erected in the forecourt and mixed in with the crowd.
David Franco and that friend of his, Olivia Levi, were just hurrying in through the main doors.
Escher, smiling benignly at the guards and the other tourists, passed through the security check and paid for his ticket while keeping a safe distance from his quarry. David had that damned valise slung over one shoulder, and though Escher fully expected the guards to force him to check it before going through the turnstile, he could see a conversation going on, in which Olivia seemed to be pitching in. A senior guard was called over, and after glancing at the contents, and exchanging some additional words, he spoke into his walkie-talkie, waited, then nodded.
A roll of tape was produced and wrapped twice in an unbroken string around the bag, sealing it closed. Then Escher could see the guard glancing at his watch, pointing up the main staircase, and off to the left. David and Olivia were nodding appreciatively before thanking the guards and heading off toward something that Escher saw was called the Galerie d’Apollon. He quickly consulted his own guide to see why.